The Living Nightmare

Quanitta Underwood: A Contender for Olympic Gold and a Survivor

Quanitta Underwood boxes in the lightweight division, one of the three weight classes to be contested in the London Olympics this summer.Credit
Justin Edmonds for The New York Times

THE TWO SISTERS shared a bed, and each night, with their hearts hammering, they would listen for the turn of the knob and the push of the door.

Quanitta Underwood was 10, her sister Hazzauna, 12. The walls of the house were thin, and the girls could hear every move their father made. Hear him sit up, hear him get out of bed, hear him walking their way.

Quanitta pinched her eyes shut when her father entered the room, but she could imagine the presence of his familiar silhouette. She felt his weight sink into the bed while his hands traveled beneath the covers. As Quanitta feigned sleep, her father groped her sister and often rolled on top.

Azzad Underwood was a forceful man, not so much in size as in manner. He was a welder by trade but gave way to few men in self-importance. He could be charming. He had been president of the parents association at the girls’ school and was among the most active members at a local Church of God in Christ.

The most important thing, Quanitta told herself, was never to let on that she knew, for this was a secret surely meant to be hidden in the dark. So she lay motionless in the bed, breathing gently through a sleeping face. Sometimes, her father pushed her aside, and she drowsily flopped over.

Then, she recalled, her strategy changed. Maybe she could protect Hazzauna by acting as if she were about to awaken. From time to time, she shifted in the bed restlessly, changing the rhythm in the sequences of her breath.

Her fear was always for her sister. Quanitta was only in the fourth grade, too young yet to imagine that Azzad would inevitably do the same things to her.

Contender and Victim

This year, for the first time, women’s boxing is an Olympic event, and many regard the 27-year-old Quanitta Underwood as America’s best hope for a medal. She is a five-time national champion, a lickety-split puncher ranked fourth in the world in the lightweight division (123 to 132 pounds), one of the three weight classes to be contested in the London Olympics this summer.

Monday brings Underwood to a crossroad in her dreams: the start of the United States Olympic boxing trials for women in Spokane, Wash. The three American winners then go on to an international qualifying event in Qinhuangdao, China, in May. Eight fighters in each division will advance to the Olympics.

Underwood, of course, covets a gold medal and the fame that would come with it. “I want to take that ride,” she says. “I want to be a household name.”

But beyond that, she wants to be a symbol of hope to anyone who has ever been sexually abused, though to do so requires something harder for her than a thousand hours of hitting the heavy bag. She has to talk about what happened.

Underwood, whose nickname is Queen, is a deeply private person. Yet last year, she initiated a Web site called Living Out the Dream. It is all at once a portal into her life story and an example of her deep reluctance to discuss it. She mentions “abuse and violation” and elliptically refers to “feeling helpless” as a 12-year-old.

Photo

Quanitta Underwood covets an Olympic gold medal. "I want to take that ride," she said.Credit
Justin Edmonds for The New York Times

But what kind of abuse? By whom? And for how long?

In January, she was asked to relate the story in detail, and though she said yes, the agreeing proved far easier than the telling. “This is like totally X-rated stuff,” she said apprehensively during the first of three long interviews. How will people judge me? she fretted continually. What will they think?

Underwood had not spoken of these things even to her closest friends. “If I don’t like something, I just hold it all in,” she said. Outside the ring, she shrinks from a fight. “If someone tries to hurt me, I’ll just take it,” she said. “I don’t want to have confrontations. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.”

As she talked, she picked at her fingernails and cuticles, leaving tiny bits like crumbs on a table. She finally brushed them aside with a sweep of her hand.

“God, I can’t believe I’m putting the story out there.”

The Welder

As a young man, Azzad Underwood moved from Youngstown, Ohio to Seattle, where he stayed with his brother and trained as a welder. An attractive teenage girl lived next door, and Azzad took amorous advantage. A baby girl, Hazzauna, was born in March 1982. At the time, Azzad was 21, and the child’s mother, Alonna Martin, was 14.

“Back then, Azzad wasn’t so bad to look at, but he was abusive and very, very manipulative,” said Alonna, whose surname is now Craddock.

For some years, Azzad juggled the affections of two very young women, asking both to be patient as he indulged his indecision. He romanced one, then the other, then back again. In December 1983, with Alonna pregnant a second time, he married her, and Quanitta was born five months later.

But matrimony did not stop the way Azzad shuttled between the women, and at one point in the comings and goings, he presented Alonna with divorce papers, which she imprudently signed and came to regret. When Azzad left for his other companion, he departed with the legal right to raise his daughters.

“I didn’t understand terms like contested or uncontested,” said Alonna, who is now a nurse in Las Cruces, N.M. “I had no older person to guide me. Just like that, I gave up custody of my girls.”

Azzad was a man of formidable energy. He worked two jobs but was also a devoted parent, fond of picnics, basketball and family activities at his Pentecostal church. He worshiped devoutly and made friends easily.

He was a strict disciplinarian. Good grades were demanded of his girls. Chores were to be completed without a word of back talk. Misbehavior was punished with cords and belts and switches cut from trees in the yard.

“We’d have welts on our butts and scars and stuff,” Quanitta said.

Alonna remarried and had two other children. She rarely saw her daughters. But when the girls were still very young — perhaps 5 and 7 — someone alerted her to the beatings. One morning, she whisked them off the bus that brought them to school. Quanitta and Hazzauna were overjoyed to suddenly be in the embrace of their real mom. She took them to her home.

But when the authorities were asked to investigate the beatings, Alonna said, the children refused to speak out against Azzad, so that was that.

The girls were returned to the care of their father.

The Family Picture Changes

In October 1990, when Quanitta was 6 and Hazzauna 8, Azzad married Tamela Bowen, a woman he worked with at Alaskan Copper Works in Seattle. At the time, she could not believe her good fortune. “What a responsible guy,” she remembered thinking. Azzad was hard-working and a churchgoer, and he seemed a loving father to his daughters.

Back then, The Seattle Times ran a regular column called “Family Portrait,” and in December 1991, the Underwoods were featured. The depiction was uplifting. The family enjoyed ice skating and watching videos. Tamela described the first year of her marriage as “a dream with all the pieces going together.” Azzad showed off the couple’s new baby. “We even had a son to top it off,” he rejoiced, extolling a marriage based on love and trust.

Photo

Underwood’s older sister, Hazzauna.Credit
Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York Times

But the contentment proved flimsy. Azzad and Tamela were laid off at the copper works, and though he soon caught on with Boeing, that job ended, too. Money was tight and the couple frequently bickered, Tamela said.

In the summer of 1994, Azzad crowded the family into their Buick Skylark and drove east to visit relatives, first in Louisiana and then in Columbia, S.C. He billed the trip as a holiday. But the weeks turned into months, and Azzad showed no interest in returning home. He found a welding job and declared the family was staying put in Columbia.

Around then, his behavior seemed to change, Tamela said: more beer and cigarettes, less religion. He still doted on his daughters, however. Some nights, Tamela woke up and found him missing from the bed. She would peek into the hall and see Azzad in the girls’ room, kneeling on the floor.

Once, she mentioned this behavior to a relative in Seattle. “‘Are you sure he’s not messing with them girls?’” Tamela recalled being asked

“And I said, ‘No way.’ ”

‘It Was Rape’

The Underwoods lived in a lime green house on Great North Road. Its three bedrooms ran along a hall on the first floor, one each for the boys, the girls and the grownups. Quanitta was 10, her older sister 12. Azzad had begun groping Hazzauna months before in Seattle. Now, even as his daughters slept side by side in a queen-size bed, he was more aggressive yet.

“I remember the first time ever; he held me down,” Hazzauna said. “It was rape. There’s no other word for it. Every time after that, it seemed he purposely did it in the room with my sister, because he knew that if I moved or screamed, she was right there and it would wake her up.”

But Quanitta heard everything. For a while, she feigned sleep. Then she feigned becoming wakeful, each time fidgeting more and more until Azzad finally entered the bedroom only to fetch Hazzauna and leave.

Tamela had begun working a night shift at McDonald’s. Azzad could be more brazen.

Fearing for her sister, Quanitta schemed. How can I stop this, she wondered. “When Hazzauna would get dragged out of the room, I’d get up, go to the bathroom, flush the toilet, make noise, knock on doors, ask where’s she’s at,” she said. “He’d make her tell me, ‘Go to sleep. Everything’s O.K.’ ”

Sometimes, Quanitta said, her sister would return to the room weeping. But whatever happened during the night went unmentioned during the day, the unspeakable acts by their very nature confined to a fearsome silence.

Hazzauna’s shame was her deepest secret and yet she felt the defilement left her oddly transparent. “In class, you feel like you are being stared at, because you feel gross, like something is wrong with you,” she said.

Hazzauna has a family of her own now, and she too works as a nurse in Las Cruces. In college, she studied child abuse, the methodologies of molesters and the horrid frequency with which molestation occurs. And while she said she now found it “empowering” to talk of what happened, tears seeped from her eyes as she revisited the memories: Azzad was her demon and her father, a man callously conniving and yet strangely pitiable.

She recalled, “On multiple occasions, he would cry like a baby, saying, ‘I’m sorry. I want to stop but just give me an amount of time.’ ”

Her father bribed her with clothes and other gifts. He threw her an expensive birthday party at a skating rink. He persuaded her to take up modeling, escorting her to competitions, where they shared a room in a hotel.

As the years went by, Hazzauna longed for the life of a normal teenager, to spend more time with friends, to attend parties, to stay out late. Azzad extracted favors in return for his permission. “My father forced me to give him oral sex so that I could go out on a date to the movies,” she said.

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Underwood’s mother, Alonna Craddock.Credit
Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York Times

He had other ways to make her submit. If Hazzauna denied him what he wanted, he threatened to turn instead to Quanitta.

This was the older girl’s greatest fear. No matter what happened, she was determined to protect her sister.

So time and again, Hazzauna made Azzad promise to leave Quanitta alone.

And repeatedly, he gave his word.

The Police Arrive

Quanitta said she was in the seventh grade when Azzad began to molest her, always taking advantage of a time when neither his wife nor Hazzauna was at home. “I would lock my arms and squeeze my legs tight,” she said, describing efforts to constrain what her father could do.

Both sisters fantasized about escape. Hazzauna hoped to one day go to college in Washington. Quanitta had darker ideas. She thought about hurting Azzad — “using a knife or something” — then running away.

What neither did was confide in the other. But that changed in January 1998. The sisters were 13 and 15. Quanitta was terribly upset about something. Hazzauna already had suspicions. She finally asked the question.

“Has he been touching you?” she said, and the scalding truth poured out.

By then, the sisters were seldom in contact with their mother in Seattle. But they did have a number for the hospital where she worked.

The things Hazzauna told Alonna were dumbfounding.

“How long has he been doing this?” the girls’ mother recalled asking.

“Forever,” Hazzauna answered.

The police arrived at the Underwood home within an hour. This time, the girls were willing to tell the truth. Azzad was at work, but Tamela was there. She remembered collapsing and bawling, her shock compounded by shame: “How could I have been so clueless?”

While married to Azzad, Tamela had given birth to three of his children. But their relationship had soured toward the end. “He would come to me, and I wouldn’t deny him,” she said. “He was my husband, but it wasn’t so often.”

In the urgency of the moment, Tamela helped the girls pack, drove them to a hotel to spend the night and put them on a flight to Seattle the next day.

She said, “The least I could do was get them on an airplane.”

Pleas From Prison

Azzad pleaded guilty to “criminal sexual conduct with a minor.” He was sentenced to seven years in prison and five years of probation. The penalty could have been stiffer. The judge asked various people to speak in court. Hazzauna and Quanitta said they did not want their dad to go to jail.

Before the proceeding, Azzad had gone to Seattle to see the girls secretly. Quanitta recalled meeting him in a car in the parking lot of a Sears. He begged forgiveness. He said counseling could cleanse his desires.

While in prison, he wrote apologetic letters to his daughters. God was back in his life, he proclaimed. He wanted absolution — and perhaps some money he might use for candy and soda at the canteen. Quanitta did not answer him.

Photo

A family photograph of Hazzauna, left, Alonna, center, and Quanitta.Credit
Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York Times

Hazzauna did. “Initially, I felt obligated to help him,” she said. “I felt bad for him. So a couple of times I sent him $100. Then I stopped.”

The Ring Beckons

The girls were given counseling, but the psychic wounds were not so easy to cauterize. They were living with their mother, and “we pretty much acted like nothing had ever happened,” Quanitta said. The idea was for things to be normal. “But what does normal mean?” she wanted to know.

In high school, Quanitta was a so-so student but a superb athlete. She played basketball and was one of the best sprinters in the state. Several college coaches wanted to give her a scholarship, but she lapsed in and out of depression during her senior year and wanly ignored the offers, she said.

After graduation, she felt adrift, unable to chart any purposeful future, absent any aptitude for happiness. She was involved in a stormy relationship and thought about suicide, even making a half-hearted attempt by swallowing a dozen or so capsules of ibuprofen, enough to feel sick for days.

Her mother moved to California; Hazzauna was at college. Quanitta felt lonely and damaged. She enlisted in the Air Force but reneged on the commitment before entering boot camp. She fell in with a new crowd. She said, “Life was all about where we’d get weed, where we’d get a drink, what party we’d go to.”

Finally, in a moment of kismet, an offhand remark changed her life. A friend mentioned a place in Seattle’s central district called Cappy’s Boxing Gym.

There wasn’t much to it: an undersize ring, the usual ropes, bags and pulleys, the stink of sweat. But to a forlorn 19-year-old, it was an enticing corner of the world. She had power-lifted in high school. Boxing was something that excited her. She liked the feel of her hands in the gloves.

Cappy Kotz, the owner, once boxed in Montana. He said he had never seen a better natural talent than Quanitta: the well-defined musculature, the economy of movement, the extraordinary flash of speed. He thought he could turn a great athlete into a great fighter, but she was starting late and it would take time.

Quanitta boxed as Queen, a nickname given to her by a childhood friend. She lost her first bout and a good many after that. She said she could not recall the number: “I stopped counting at nine.”

In her first big tournament, the 2006 nationals, she was eliminated on Day 1, moving sluggishly in her bout, punching as if she were underwater. She then had to spend several frustrating days sitting in the stands, watching the other fighters advance through the bracket.

This was devastating. She pouted. And yet before the week ended, she was able to transform the disappointment into determination. She promised herself she would become a more precise puncher, to think more strategically within the ropes.

Kotz considered it a metamorphosis. He said, “She stepped out of her skin and became something new.”

An Unseen Opponent

To earn a living, Quanitta had entered a five-year apprenticeship as a pipefitter, but even after lugging heavy metal tubes all day, she would put in her hours at the gym. She won her first national amateur title in 2007 and then added four more. As she became a better boxer, she matured as a person. “People gravitate toward her; she’s charismatic, charming,” Kotz said.

He and Quanitta had a falling-out last year; she wanted to switch to coaches more familiar with international competition. He is 56 and comes across like the crusty but wise trainer played by Burgess Meredith in “Rocky.”

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Quanitta Underwood, 27, began boxing late, at 19. “To fail now, after what I’ve given up, I just don’t even want to think about it,” she said.Credit
Jack Dempsey/Associated Press

Kotz knew she was molested as a child, though not the details. He thought the abuse was an albatross that sometimes kept her in an “emotional holding pattern.” By his reckoning, she has posttraumatic stress like a war veteran, allowing certain smells and sounds to propel her into the past. In the ring, it meant she often allowed herself to be pushed around in a clinch.

“She has trouble with messy boxers, who push you and shove you,” he said. “To win, you have to dominate. She scores points because she is so fast, but she is not a slugger. Sometimes, you have to be down and dirty.”

His field is boxing, of course, not psychology. And Quanitta has proved herself a champion. But other savvy observers said much the same, that her inner strength had yet to match her physical gifts. She fights scared.

And yet there was one unforgettable bout in 2010 that seemed to foretell greatness. In a semifinal at the world championships in Barbados, Queen was matched against Katie Taylor of Ireland, considered by some to be the top amateur boxer in the world, male or female.

As expected, Taylor jumped out to a 10-2 lead with classic scoring combinations. But then Quanitta began to brawl, landing one haymaker to the head after another. Taylor became exhausted trying to defend herself and fell to the canvas with fatigue. Cannier than Quanitta, she recovered, scoring with jabs as the fight ended and barely winning, 18-16.

Basheer Abdullah, a past United States coach in the Olympics, was in Quanitta’s corner that day. He said he remembered what he shouted at her in the seconds before she unleashed the barrage. He called out, “What are you afraid of?”

The Welder at 51

Azzad’s sentence was cut to six years, and he left prison in August 2005. He lives in a modern apartment complex in Columbia, S.C., working again as a welder. A painting of Jesus stares from the wall above his kitchen table.

He is 51 now, wearing bifocals, his shirt straining over an expanding middle. He vacillated about being interviewed. “I’ve already done enough harm to those children,” he said. Then he agreed to talk on condition that his older sister Ameenah be present. “She helped me through my ordeal,” he said.

His answers were often spare, a nod followed by “O.K.” or “no comment.” He refused to discuss the molesting of his daughters but made no effort to deny it. Being arrested was a relief, he said: “I was struggling between two forces. I wanted to do right but instead I did wrong. That’s it in a nutshell.”

Then Azzad amended the thought. It’s more complicated than that, he said. The counselors in prison made him aware of how the mind creates justifications to tolerate its own misdeeds. “When you do things for a long time that you know to be wrong, you come to think that it’s right,” he said.

Aberrant behavior may have detectable roots. When he was a boy, Azzad said, he delivered newspapers, and a man on his route abused him, “sexually, repeatedly.” A second cousin had also molested him.

But he said he was not mentioning these traumas as an excuse: “Whether that was a contributing factor, I still need to be held accountable.”

Azzad shook his head, wrung his hands. “I wouldn’t want my worst enemy to go through what I’ve been through, being torn from job, family, kids, the whole works,” he said, and his sister Ameenah added, “That’s right.”

‘I Became Strong’

Quanitta (now better known as Queen), her hair braided, her smile wide, her voice playful, is something to behold. People take to her right away.

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Underwood, a lightweight ranked fourth in the world, has won five national amateur championships.Credit
Jack Dempsey/Associated Press

For the past six months, everything in her life besides boxing was put off: relationships, family, the $38 an hour she could earn installing pipe. Quanitta took only a few things with her to Colorado. King, her beloved 2-year-old bull mastiff, was left with dog sitters found on Craigslist.

The Olympics are expected to catapult women’s boxing into the limelight. If an American wins a medal, fame will probably follow, with endorsements and perhaps even lucrative bouts as a professional.

“I’m working harder than I’ve ever worked before,” Quanitta said. “To fail now, after what I’ve given up, I just don’t even want to think about it.”

The unburdening of her family history proved a burden in itself these past weeks. Some people shared more details than Quanitta was willing to reveal. She asked that certain particulars be kept private, and they have been.

“I don’t think I’ll read the story, not with the Olympic trials so close,” she said two weeks ago. “I can’t have distractions.”

Quanitta, a girl who felt like a nobody, always imagined there was a somebody within. That’s why she called her Web site Living Out the Dream.

“I would close my eyes and just dream about having a different life, because I thought that if I had this thing, this success, I’d feel like I was at a point of starting over,” she said. “That dream carried me through a lot of days.”

She paused for a second, then continued purposefully: “I can be an example. I am a survivor of child abuse, and I became strong and independent.”

Azzad visited Seattle two years ago, and Quanitta reluctantly agreed to see him for the first time in a decade. She had no interest in reconciliation. Actually, she was tired of his “whole remorse story,” she said.

She considered the meeting to be something like a final goodbye. She did not want to be alone with him, so she recruited an aunt and cousins to come along. They met Azzad on Broadway Avenue in the Capitol Hill district and then everyone set off toward a popular eatery called Dick’s.

As she walked beside her father, she sized him up. He was trying to look cool, dressing young, Quanitta thought. She herself was “thugged out,” wearing baggy clothes and Timberland boots.

It was odd to be beside him now. She intended her every movement to make a statement. She walked with a swagger — “wanting to look tough” — as if she were entering the boxing ring.

Azzad was much smaller than she remembered and nowhere near as fit as she was. In the passing of time, the physical equation had changed, and a satisfying notion popped into her head.

If she wanted to, she could flatten him, no problem.

Jack Styczynski contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on February 12, 2012, on page SP1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Living Nightmare. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe